his wife in his arms, he carried her into another room, and summoned the servants to her assistance. Armed with a revolver, he then went back to the chest, and lifted up the lid; but Fastini was half-suffocated by this time, and was dragged out by Thornhurst more dead than alive. Ultimately, the Italian was reconsigned to the place from which he had escaped; but a long time passed before the painter's wife recovered thoroughly from the effects of that terrible hour. British Quarterly. THE WORKS OF CHARLES LAMB.* THE wanderer in London, if he deserts the main currents of the mighty river of life, which flows there unceasingly, will often find himself in tranquil bays, where the human wave stirs not, and the remote thunder of the great tide of men is toned down to a soft susurrus. Notwithstanding the vast changes wrought in these days by eccentric Ediles and by railway companies omnipotent in their insolvency, such quiet haunts are still to be found in the metropolis. A square paved court, surrounded by edifices where lawyers spread their subtle cobwebs, a fountain sparkling in the centre, amid trees that dream of unknown country air; an old college or library, with untrodden turf in its silent quadrangle; a tavern entered by a long, narrow, unsuspected passage where the head waiter looks like a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries, and is utterly puzzled by the arrival of a stranger: places like these, though they grow rarer, are still to be found in London. And, when the wanderer finds himself in such a place, the thought of Charles Lamb comes to him naturally. The last of our essayists was a Londoner, and a lover of London's antique and tranquil aspects. There is poetry wherever there is life; in the *The Works of Charles Lamb. A new edition. London: Edward Moxon & Co. 1866. Charles Lamb: His Friends, his Haunts, and his Books. By PERCY FITZGERALD, M.A., F.S.A. London: Richard Bentley. 1866. Charles Lamb. A Memoir. By BARRY CORNWELL. London: Edward Moxon & Co. 1866. strong life of London, with all its deep tragedy, wild melodrama, broad farce, there is too much poetry for the grasp of any intellect not colossal. But the poetry of its forgotten corners, of its "back-water," if we may use the phrase, found a perfect representative in Charles Lamb. He loved what was quaint by reason of contrast with ordinary things. He was in essence a humorist that is, a man who looks more at the dif ferences of the people he encounters than at their resemblances; and he was especially an archæological humorist, to whom there was matter more attractive in the differences between the past and the present than in their aspects of identity. It is clear that the great poet, epic or dramatic, will regard more the elements of humanity wherein men are identical, for these form the chief part of human nature; but the humorist (and the supreme poet is always inclusively a humorist) is essentially the analyst of their differences. There are humorists without poetry, such as Montaigne and Sidney Smith, and Charles Dickens; there are humorists like Thackeray, possessing a poet's vein, which they use rarely and reluctantly; but Charles Lamb was poet and humorist, and as such commands a stronger, subtler sympathy. The Spectator, a journal in which we find some of the keenest modern criticism, sees much similarity between Lamb and Sidney Smith-believing that their main differences arose from the cheerful temperament of the one, and the melancholy temperament of the other. "If we may be allowed such a description, Sidney Smith's liquor was humor mixed with sense, and Charles Lamb's humor mixed with nonsense, but the spirit in both was the same." But this, we think, is an erroneous hypothesis. Sidney Smith, in the first place, was wholly unpoetic; hence an essential dissimilarity. And, although his common-sense was so exquisite as to be almost genius, his humor consisted generally in an exaggeration which reached the very borders of nonsense. Lamb, on the other hand, gives us apparent nonsense which contains the germs of the soundest sense. We open the Essays of Elia, quite at hazard-exercising, in fact, a kind of Sortes Carolagnuli and fall upon "A Quakers' Meeting." Where to a funeral, where I made a pun, to the con"DEAR P-: I am so poorly. I have been sternation of the rest of the mourners. And we had wine. I can't describe to you the howl which the widow set up at proper intervals. Dash could, for it is not unlike what he makes. is the nonsense mingling with the humor | And these wilder letters of Lamb's. of that essay? Surely it is full of wis- were doubtless the result of a reäction dom. "Once only," says Lamb, "I wit- from extreme despondency. The one nessed a sample of the old Foxian or- to which at present we refer, written to gasm. It was a man of giant stature, Mr. Patmore, at Paris, might certainly who, as Wordsworth phrases it, might be used as a test of a reader's capacity have danced from head to foot equipt to enjoy nonsense. We extract a few in iron mail.' His frame was of iron, paragraphs: too. But he was malleable. I saw him shake all over with the spirit-I dare not say of delusion." Would Sidney Smith have described a Quaker "holding forth" with this calm tolerance, this wise dubiety? Would he not rather have given us a farcical exaggeration, very provocative of immediate mirth, but of no permanent value. "He had been a wrr in his youth,' he told us, with expressions of a sober remorse." How would the witty Canon of St. Paul's have luxuriated in the grim hysterical Quaker who fondly fancied that he had once been a wit! But Elia treats him tenderly. "His brow would have scared away the Levities-the Jocos Risusque -faster than the Loves fled the face of Dis at Enna. By wit, even in his youth, I will be sworn he understood something far within the limits of an allowable liberty." Not to Sidney Smith alone, nor to men similarly keen after absurdities, but to the majority of us, a perfectly silent session of Quakers would seem ridiculous. Lamb saw its poetic aspect. "The mind has been fed. You go away with a sermon not made with hands. You have been in the milder caverns of Trophonius; or as in some den where that fiercest and savagest of all wild creatures, the TONGUE, that unruly member, has strangely lain tied up and captive." "Did you ever taste frogs? Get them, if you can. They are like little Lilliput rabbits, only a thought nicer. "We had a merry passage with the widow at the Commons. She was howling-part howling and part giving directions to the proctor-when crash! down went my sister through a crazy chair, and made the clerks grin, and I grinned, and the widow tittered and then I knew that she was not inconsol able. This is nonsense in full effervescence -the sort of thing which most ladies and all Scotchmen who have not a touch of the Wilsonian character find it impossible to laugh at -it is so very silly. Christopher North The very next essay, "The Old and had a noble capacity for nonsense; but the New Schoolmaster," might be taken few of his countrymen share it in any as a perfect example of "humor mixed degree; and, indeed, it seems rarer in with sense," instead of with nonsense. England than of old. Are we tamed It has a delicate apprehension, almost by the trials of the time-by the increasprophetic, of the change just commencing earnestness of life? We have noing in education. But perhaps the critic who perceives a nonsensical element in Lamb's humor thinks rather of those exquisitely droll letters-the oddest of which is the gem of Mr. Percy Fitzgerald's collection. Hood has said: "There's not a string attuned to mirth But has its chord in melancholy." ticed, especially in the Saturday Review, which, since the fire of its hot youth decayed, has been the organ of the intellectual Philistines-Sadducean and cynical-remarks on the Noctes Ambrosi ance which showed absolute incapacity to appreciate the manliness which is the differential quality of those marvellous colloquies. The dominant temperament just now is business-like and critical: | Wordsworth, three than Coleridge, two young England talks learnedly of the than Walter Savage Landor, who has Economist's opinion on the Bank rate, only just passed from among us, and and wishes Mr. Matthew Arnold were Byron's strong spirit was not to enter a little more practical in his theory of the world for thirteen years. Lamb's Geist. The time is cautious and criti- father was a barrister's clerk; his macal, but this cannot last: the young ternal grandmother was housekeeper to Age, creative, demiurgic, will assuredly the Plumers, in Hertfordshire; and come forth to conquest, though its in- there is nothing aristocratic known or fancy be baptized with fire. imagined about his pedigree. His own speculations on the matter are embodied in a characteristic sonnet: Charles Lamb was born in Crown "What reason first imposed thy gentle name, Without reproach? We trace our stream no higher; And I, a childless man, may end the same. In manners guileless as his own sweet flocks, And arch allusions of his fellow swains. With glory gotten on the heads abhorred Whate'er the fount whence thy beginnings came, is dead," he would say, many times a day. And he wrote most nobly and tenderly thereon; it seems to have been the last he ever wrote. Well kept was that gentle resolve. | it clung to him perpetually. "Coleridge Lamb was educated at Christ's Hospital, whose antique atmosphere did much to mould his character; where, moreover, he had for a schoolfellow Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the most influencing mind of the century. But for Coleridge, we might have had no essays of Elia. Their friendship endured. Together with Lloyd, they published a small volume of verse in 1797, the motto on its title-page being from the hand of Coleridge: Duplex nobis vinculum, et amicitiæ et similium junctarumque Came narum; quod utinam neque mors solvat, neque temporis longuinquitas. Well was the wish fulfilled, as between Lamb and Coleridge. In the last year of his life, thus wrote Coleridge on a flyleaf of his own "Sibylline Leaves:" "Ch. & Mary Lamb, 1797 1834 37 years!" And when tidings of Coleridge's death reached Charles Lamb, the thought of "When I heard," he says, "of the death of Coleridge, it was without grief. It seemed to me that he long had been on the contines of the next world-that he had a hunger for eternity. I grieved then that I could not grieve. But since, I feel how great a part he was of me. His great and dear spirit haunts me. I cannot think a thought, I cannot make a criticism on men or books, without an ineffectual turning and reference to him. . . . Never saw I his likeness, nor probably the world can see again." These words show the royal influence possessed by Coleridge over men worthy to listen to him. Thanks, in a measure, to Mr. Carlyle's bleak ridicule, there are many who question the greatness of Coleridge and we find even Mr. Procter asking: "What did he do?" We wonder what answer Charles Lamb or William Wordsworth would have made to that question: and even they could not foresee that his stimulative intellect would be the primary force in the "Young England" and the "Broad Church movements. It would be very 29 difficult to attain a full estimate of his influence upon England as it is. would not a jury of average Englishmen have declared Byron to be mad if all his wild freaks had been laid before them? What can be said of a man who, at a dinner-party, refuses anything but biscuits and soda - water, failing which, he dines on potatoes and vinegar who kept a bear at college, and a lion and a hundred other strange animals afterward who risks his life in swimming across the Hellespont because some Greek gentleman is said to have done it-who gives up the comforts of English life, and (appalling thought!) a seat in the House of Peers, just to help a struggling nation whose courage and success are doubtful and their ingratitude certain? Here are not a tithe of Byron's best-known eccentricities, yet would they suffice in the eyes of the majority of commonplace people to convict him of insanity. It would be a valuable contribution to the psychology of genius, if we could know what peculiar form of insanity caused Charles Lamb to pass six weeks of his twenty-first year in a madhouse at Hoxton. None of his biographers have any information hereon; the only hints we have are from his letter to Coleridge. "Many a vagary," he says, "my imagination played with meenough to make a volume, if all were told. Quaint influences were destined to surround Charles Lamb, his boyish clerkship being in that old South Sea House, described inimitably in Elia's first essay. At that "poor neighbor out of business" of Bank and 'Change and India House, whose directors met only "to proclaim a dead dividend," he passed a few years: thence, at the age of seventeen, he was transferred to the service of the East India Company. Four years later came the day of horrors, when his sister Mary, victim of homicidal mania, stabbed her mother to the heart. Here we desire to say as little as possible: it is well known that Charles Lamb became from that time the guardian of his sister, his elder brother declining to act in the matter; and it seems clear that he had some fair vision of love which to this end he dismissed utterly. It has been suggested that his devotion to Mary was sympathetic rather than sacrificing; that he felt himself hovering on the frontier between sanity and insanity, and therefore cast his lot with hers. This is doubtful. Certainly the hereditary insanity of his family had, previous to the terrible catastrophe, definitely shown itself in him: there is a letter to Coleridge, written in the spring of 1796, in which he supplies Coleridge! it may conevidence of this. "My life has been vince you of my regards for you, when somewhat diversified of late. The six I tell you my head ran on you in my weeks that finished last year and began madness, as much almost as on anthis, your humble servant spent very other person, who, I am inclined to agreeably in a madhouse at Hoxton. I think, was the more immediate cause am got somewhat rational now, and of my temporary frenzy." This gives don't bite any one. But mad I was." a slight clue to the source of mental This terrible affliction, which fell upon disease; doubtless the boy's poetic him thus as he emerged from boyhood, fancy had indeed fixed on the girl never recurred. A question of immeas-"with bright yellow Hertfordshire hair urable interest is raised here. What is .madness? What are its limits? Often we hear a man of the world remark that somebody is a very clever fellow-" but quite mad, you know." Inquiry might, perhaps, show that this was a person who sacrificed all luxuries and most comforts for the good of others. Byron, whose sight was always keen and clear, except when the lens of prejudice interposed, abhorred war, stigmatized Alexander as Macedonia's "madman," and would probably, if here to judge, deem the Count Bismarck mad. And and eye of watchet hue," whom he long this man which interests me more than the sanity of Lord Byron and Walter Scott." Whether Lamb ever met Blake does not appear, but he expressed a high opinion of the artist's powers; and it is certain that few painters have possessed such wealth of imagination, while no poets have excelled the exquisite simplicity of some of his lyrics. Here is a stanza which might have been written by an Elizabethan song-writer: "His face is fair as heaven, When springing buds unfold; Whose heart is wintry cold? most of us to shrink from any discussion of the subject; but if we were to recognize the fact that mania is a thing of degree, and that perfect sanity is probably as rare as perfect health, it would certainly assist us in estimating character. If this were the place for such speculations, important inferences might be drawn from the life and character of Mary Lamb. Although to the end of her life subject to recurrent attacks of mania, which gradually weakened her intellect, during her lucid intervals she was her brother's best friend. "I am a fool," he wrote, in 1805, to Miss Wordsworth, "bereft of her cooperation. I am used to look up to her in the least and biggest perplexities. . . . She is older, wiser, and better than I am." Well, though never locked up, Blake must certainly be called mad on any Apart from his one great and endurmodern definition. He saw visions; ing trial, the life of Charles Lamb was aye, and has left us graphic portraits of uneventful. He was very fortunate in men and women who appeared to him his friends. Through Coleridge he beas, for instance, David and Bath came acquainted with Wordsworth and sheba, Cœur de Lion, Edward I., Wal- Southey; while, among other less lace, Wat Tyler, "the Man who built known names, Manning, a mathematithe Pyramids." Angels he believed cal tutor at Cambridge, was one of his that he saw, and fairies, and often most valuable associates. The humorturned aside in the street to avoid jost-ist and mathematician understood each ling some spectre of the past. And other well. In both there was what what would Dr. Winslow say of the evidence given in his biographer's words? "At the end of the little garden, in Hercules' Buildings, there was a summer-house. Mr. Butts, calling one day, found Mr. and Mrs. Blake sitting in this summer-house, freed from those troublesome disguises' which have prevailed since the fall. Come in,' cried Blake; it's only Adam and Eve, you know!' Husband and wife had been reciting passages from Paradise Lost in character, and the garden of Hercules' Buildings had to represent the Garden of Eden." Mr. Gilchrist, with the usual zeal of a biographer, contends that Blake was not mad. Of course, this is entirely a question of terms. If, when the general opinion attributes insanity to a man of genius, his biographers, instead of acting as counsel for the defence, would attempt an accurate "It is New Year here. That is, it was definition of the limits of his sanity, we New Year half a year back, when I was writmight, in time, learn something in re- time and space, and yet nothing puzzles me ing this. Nothing puzzles me more than gard to the relations between genius less, for I never think of them. The Persian and madness. There is a certain super- ambassador is the principal thing talked of stitious awe of lunacy, which causes now. I sent some people to see him worship It may be called a tangency of disposition. Elia, fettered to his clerkly routine, in-. dulged this propensity in the far-travelling fantasies of the immortal essays. Manning, after long revolution in the unvaried circle of Cambridge tuition, flew off at a tangent to China, with intent to produce a lexicon of its language -a design never fulfilled. would have been pleasant to have had some specimens of Manning's share in the long and cordial correspondence which took place between them. We sometimes think that Lamb's play of fancy is freer in his letters to the math-. ematician than in any others. Those which he wrote to him when in China are very choice; his friend's strange remoteness aroused his lively imagination. Thus he writes: |